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Crushed
In Britain earlier this fall, three solicitors lost their careers. The High Court of England & Wales, overturning a decision by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, ruled that the three lawyers,...
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The Coming End of Lawyer Control Over Legal Regulation
At the end of last year, as John-Paul Boyd ably chronicled on this website, members of the Law Society of BC voted on three resolutions regarding access to justice. The second of these resolutions —...
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Permission to Dream
If you’re a lawyer, you probably grew up in socio-economically advantaged circumstances. I submit this to you not as a value judgment or accusation, but as a pretty well-established fact. In 2011, UCLA...
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Why LinkedIn Has Lost Its Value for Me
I recently accepted a connection request and added my 3,000th contact on LinkedIn. I’d like to use this notable occasion to describe how I’ve completely failed to derive any real value from LinkedIn...
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Empathy for the Disrupted
I use both taxis and Uber, depending on the situation. Here’s at least one thing that differentiates each from the other. If you’ve taken a taxi in the last few years and the subject of Uber has come...
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Legal Regulatory Reform in Britain and the US: Will History Repeat?
A reporter called me the other day with a perfectly simple question about the potentially enormous changes to legal regulation on the way in California, Utah, and Arizona. Specifically, she noted that...
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Law School Gets This Right. Law Practice Gets It Wrong.
Earlier this month, I was kindly invited by Jason Morris to speak (via Skype) to his “Coding The Law” class at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. We had a great chat on a range of topics, but...
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Three New Law School Concepts
It is possible that traditional law schools will reinvent themselves structurally from the ground up and become exemplars of innovative 21st-century lawyer formation. It is also possible that I will...
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The Future of Justice in a COVID-19 World
I wrote this column and submitted it to Slaw on March 6, back when we didn’t know how good we had it. I’m writing this new prologue on March 17, with much of Canada and the world effectively in...
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The Year of Distancing Physically: Six Tips for Online Learning in Law Schools
Already here in May, it seems inevitable that the new law school year in September will not be carried out entirely in person. Universities ranging from McGill in Canada to Cambridge in the UK have...
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Unbundle the Courts
It’s been a long time since I did an analysis of the constitutional give-and-take between the courts and the legislature when it comes to Charter decisions, so I’m not going to opine on Justice...
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Access to Justice Is Not (Just) About Lawyers and Judges
Imagine for a moment that starting tomorrow, every lawyer in the world could be hired at no charge. They’re not working for free — maybe Jeff Bezos has decided to subsidize every lawyer’s income for...
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The Paradigm Shift of Regulatory Sandboxes
Earlier this fall, the Law Society of British Columbia made headlines when it announced the creation of an “Innovation Sandbox” that would allow unauthorized providers of legal services to deliver...
View ArticleThe Stakeholder Law Firm
I’ll be writing about law firms less frequently in future, for reasons outlined here. But given how critical I’ve been about the way in which lawyers run their firms, I thought I’d share with you news...
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How Major League Baseball Could Transform Lawyer Development
Spring is here, so allow me to introduce you to Joshua Palacios, a young outfielder for the Toronto Blue Jays who has something to teach us about the development of new lawyers. Josh, who is 25, made...
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Radical Solutions to Lawyer Overwork
A correspondent from Europe wrote me recently to ask if I had any thoughts about unhealthy work schedules and high billing pressures facing young law firm associates. I had assumed this was strictly an...
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What “Protecting the Public” Really Means
Regulators of legal services often say that their most important job is to “protect the public.” If this statement is true, then we need to consider its implications for the future regulation of the...
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Lawyer Competence vs. Lawyer Competitiveness
If you’ve been following my work over at Law21, you’ll know that I’ve been immersed lately in lawyer competence: what its components are, what its less obvious elements include, and how we can go about...
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Time and Relative Dimensions in Slaw
As part of a holiday party gift-exchange mixup, you have been accidentally given a time machine. Since the Rules of Professional Conduct don’t specifically say you can’t tamper with history, you may...
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Creating a Workplace for the Next Generation
Very few lawyers in modern law firms devote much attention to whether their firm will still be around a generation from now. They’re far more focused on the next hour to be billed, the next call from...
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